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Does the plock have any basis in history (anatomy? dodoology?) does anyone know how the sound of a dodo was described by visitors to mauritius?

/me thinks about other fictional dodos
/me turns to the appropriate section of Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency and finds that the only noise the dodo makes is when it 'squarks an impatient squark' whilst trying to persuade Richard to feed it

oh well. Any other suggestions?

Rob, who now wants to be a proffessor of dodoology having made up the word (he thinks) and seen it written down

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That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

i always hear elisabeth sastre (the woman who read the first three books in audio) whenever i read the "plock, plock" sound. she does an enthusiatically silly and yet proud plock sound that works quite well.

Hit Google for 'plock sound' and go to the Folklore magazine article where one Marty Reisman says that "kerplock-plock" is the sound a ping pong rally makes.
I'm presuming that the "ker" is the sound of the racket hit, soooo.....

Auditory perception is unique to the individual, and linguistically any symbol(s) may represent a sound, so for the dodo to have its sound recorded as 'plock, plock' does not imply that the sound you associate with those symbols is the same as the dodo does.

Besides, if you had a craving for marshmallows you would probably find enunciation of any other sound difficult while maintaining a hold on the source of your pleasure.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A picture is worth a thousand words. A chocolate is worth a thousand pictures.

As you say, "linguistically any symbol(s) may represent a sound", however while writing in English, the onomatopoeic word "plock" is made of a set of symbols with pre-assigned sounds.
The sound produced is fixed: it is only an individual's perception of that sound which varies. Even allowing for an individual's differing auditory perceptions, which must be slight for viable communication to be possible, would not the variations in perception between two people be constant and so their hearing of "plock" while different, be different in a constant way? The dodo's perception of its own sound is immaterial.

I'm going for the sound of a small rock falling onto a ping-pong table.

There is a french-german TV programme called karambolage that, between a lot of other things, compares onomatopoetic representations of sounds in german and french language. (You get to see some people from both countries who apparently got asked things like: "Make a sound like a cow!") It is extremely instructional.

Could you, for example, imagine the vast differences between the sound representation of sneezing? German: Hatschi! French: Atchoum! ...and in english, I found two spellings which even differ in the number of syllables: atishoo! and achoo!

I can remember there was also once a comparison between echoisms for the cry of a cock, where not only the different languages had completely different perceptions of what is heard (kikeriki vs. cocorico vs. cock-a-doodle-doo), even all the individuals trying to imitate the sounds did widely different things with them!

as you will have noticed, the book-specific forums tend to be quite quiet after the book has been around for a while. You will find far more activity in the "Nextian Chat" forum, where there are games, cyber food (I specialise in pies), serious, semi-serious and downright silly discussions on all topics. Few of the residents bite, so feel free to make yourself known over there.